Woldemar Kernig

Woldemar Kernig, known in Russia as Vladimir Mikhailovich Kernig (1840 to 1917), was a Russian internist and neurologist of Baltic German descent, remembered for Kernig's sign of meningitis. Born in St Petersburg to a bookbinder of German origin, he took his medical doctorate at Dorpat in 1864 with a dissertation on the regulation of body temperature in sick and healthy people, and in the same year began work at the Obukhov Hospital in St Petersburg, where he served as chief physician from 1890 until his retirement in 1911. In 1882 he published his observation that in a patient with meningitis who sits upright with hips and knees flexed, extending the knee beyond 135 degrees is painful. In 1904 he described acute pericarditis following severe attacks of angina pectoris. He also helped organise higher medical education for women in Russia and the founding of the Medical Institute for Women.